Identifying Potential and Actual Opportunities for Exporting Hi-tech Products in Iran (DSM Appraoch)

High-tech products play an important role in world trade exchange. Although Iranian economy has a low-volume exports in terms of high technology industries, lacking a prominent place in the world, it has some advantageous potentials compared to other countries in the region, by virtue of which can develop ICT, if it produces high-quality products and use a updated knowledge on marketing in order to select the target markets.
Examining the production and export of ICT products over the period 2010-2013, this paper aims to identify and prioritize some potential and actual opportunities for exporting Hi-tech Products in Iran. In doing so, the paper uses the Decision Support Model (DSM) approach and introduces High-tech products in terms of four-number codes based on a harmonized system on description and coding of commodities (HS).
The results of this study indicate the fact that Iran’s high-tech exports contains 2455 export possibilities, which 235 export possibilities combine country-product as actual export possiilities and 2220 combine country-product as potential export possibilities. in most of the products, countries with priority are mainly from Asia, especially the middle East, central Asia, and the caucasus.Thus there is a wide Gap between realized exports and export possiilities.